Bunnahabhain 10 Years Old 2014 Cask #2615 (G&M)

Gordon & MacPhail hold one of the deepest cask inventories of any independent bottler in Scotland, built up across more than a century of relationships with working distilleries. Casks 2614 and 2615 sit consecutively in the bottler's filling ledger from 2014 production at Bunnahabhain, sister vessels from the same parcel. This is the second of the two, released in the Spirit of Scotland single-cask line at 59.7% natural strength after a 10-year cool dunnage maturation.

The cask is Oloroso sherry. Bunnahabhain has supplied G&M with sherry-cask stock across multiple decades, and the bottler's Bunnahabhain releases lean almost uniformly into that style. At ten years, the spirit has rounded its new-make edges but hasn't yet been deeply absorbed into the cask wood, so the distillery character pushes through the sherry layer with clarity. Sister-cask comparisons against the slightly lower-ABV #2614 are the kind of side-by-side that really shows up where individual casks within the same parcel diverge.

The 59.7% bottling strength is high for ten years and indicates a low-evaporation cool warehouse storage. That preserves both spirit weight and cask oils. Expect classic young-but-concentrated sherry-matured Bunnahabhain: the oily, lightly maritime distillate carrying Oloroso's nutty fig-and-walnut markers, with the cask freshness still in evidence given the relatively short maturation. Water lifts the sherry aromatics and helps reveal the cask differences against the sister bottling. Natural colour, non-chill-filtered, single cask.